CHAPTER V.

PHARAOH REFUSES.

v. 1—23.

After forty years of obscurity and silence, Moses re-enters the
magnificent halls where he had formerly turned his back upon so great a
place. The rod of a shepherd is in his hand, and a lowly Hebrew by his
side. Men who recognise him shake their heads, and pity or despise the
fanatic who had thrown away the most dazzling prospects for a dream. But
he has long since made his choice, and whatever misgivings now beset him
have regard to his success with Pharaoh or with his brethren, not to the
wisdom of his decision.

Nor had he reason to repent of it. The pomp of an obsequious court was a
poor thing in the eyes of an ambassador of God, who entered the palace
to speak such lofty words as never passed the lips of any son of
Pharaoh’s daughter. He was presently to become a god unto Pharaoh, with
Aaron for his prophet.

In itself, his presence there was formidable. The Hebrews had been
feared when he was an infant. Now their cause was espoused by a man of
culture, who had allied himself with their natural leaders, and was
returned, with the deep and steady fire of a zeal which forty years of
silence could not quench, to assert the rights of Israel as an
independent people.

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There is a terrible power in strong convictions, especially when
supported by the sanctions of religion. Luther on one side, Loyola on
the other, were mightier than kings when armed with this tremendous
weapon. Yet there are forces upon which patriotism and fanaticism
together break in vain. Tyranny and pride of race have also strong
impelling ardours, and carry men far. Pharaoh is in earnest as well as
Moses, and can act with perilous energy. And this great narrative begins
the story of a nation’s emancipation with a human demand, boldly made,
but defeated by the pride and vigour of a startled tyrant and the
tameness of a downtrodden people. The limitations of human energy are
clearly exhibited before the direct interference of God begins. All that
a brave man can do, when nerved by lifelong aspiration and by a sudden
conviction that the hour of destiny has struck, all therefore upon which
rationalism can draw, to explain the uprising of Israel, is exhibited in
this preliminary attempt, this first demand of Moses.

Menephtah was no doubt the new Pharaoh whom the brothers accosted so
boldly. What we glean of him elsewhere is highly suggestive of some
grave event left unrecorded, exhibiting to us a man of uncontrollable
temper yet of broken courage, a ruthless, godless, daunted man. There is
a legend that he once hurled his spear at the Nile when its floods rose
too high, and was punished with ten years of blindness. In the Libyan
war, after fixing a time when he should join his vanguard, with the main
army, a celestial vision forbade him to keep his word in person, and the
victory was gained by his lieutenants. In another war, he boasts of
having slaughtered the people and set fire to them, and netted the
entire country as men
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net birds. Forty years then elapse without war
and without any great buildings; there are seditions and internal
troubles, and the dynasty closes with his son.99 Robinson, “The Pharaohs of the Bondage.”
All this is exactly
what we should expect, if a series of tremendous blows had depopulated a
country, abolished an army, and removed two millions of the working
classes in one mass.

But it will be understood that this identification, concerning which
there is now a very general consent of competent authorities, implies
that the Pharaoh was not himself engulfed with his army. Nothing is on
the other side except a poetic assertion in Psalm cxxxvi. 15, which is
not that God destroyed, but that He “shook off” Pharaoh and his host in
the Red Sea, because His mercy endureth for ever.

To this king, then, whose audacious family had usurped the symbols of
deity for its head-dress, and whose father boasted that in battle “he
became like the god Mentu” and “was as Baal,” the brothers came as yet
without miracle, with no credentials except from slaves, and said, “Thus
saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Let My people go, that they may hold a
feast unto Me in the wilderness.” The issue was distinctly raised: did
Israel belong to Jehovah or to the king? And Pharaoh answered, with
equal decision, “Who is Jehovah, that I should hearken unto His voice? I
know not Jehovah, and what is more, I will not let Israel go.”

Now, the ignorance of the king concerning Jehovah was almost or quite
blameless: the fault was in his practical refusal to inquire. Jehovah
was no concern of his: without waiting for information, he at once
decided
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that his grasp on his captives should not relax. And his second
fault, which led to this, was the same grinding oppression of the
helpless which for eighty years already had brought upon his nation the
guilt of blood. Crowned and national cupidity, the resolution to wring
from their slaves the last effort consistent with existence, such greed
as took offence at even the momentary pause of hope while Moses pleaded,
because “the people of the land are many, and ye make them rest from
their burdens,”—these shut their hearts against reason and religion,
and therefore God presently hardened those same hearts against natural
misgiving and dread and awe-stricken submission to His judgments.

For it was against religion also that he was unyielding. In his ample
Pantheon there was room at least for the possibility of the entrance of
the Hebrew God, and in refusing to the subject people, without
investigation, leisure for any worship, the king outraged not only
humanity, but Heaven.

The brothers proceed to declare that they have themselves met with the
deity, and there must have been many in the court who could attest at
least the sincerity of Moses; they ask for liberty to spend a day in
journeying outward and another in returning, with a day between for
their worship, and warn the king of the much greater loss to himself
which may be involved in vengeance upon refusal, either by war or
pestilence. But the contemptuous answer utterly ignores religion:
“Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, loose the people from their work? Get
ye unto your burdens.”

And his counter-measures are taken without loss of time: “that same day”
the order goes out to exact the regular quantity of brick, but supply no
straw for binding
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it together. It is a pitiless mandate, and
illustrates the fact, very natural though often forgotten, that men as a
rule cannot lose sight of the religious value of their fellow-men, and
continue to respect or pity them as before. We do not deny that men who
professed religion have perpetrated nameless cruelties, nor that
unbelievers have been humane, sometimes with a pathetic energy, a
tenacious grasp on the virtue still possible to those who have no Heaven
to serve. But it is plain that the average man will despise his brother,
and his brother’s rights, just in proportion as the Divine sanctions of
those rights fade away, and nothing remains to be respected but the
culture, power and affluence which the victim lacks. “I know not
Israel’s God” is a sure prelude to the refusal to let Israel go, and
even to the cruelty which beats the slave who fails to render impossible
obedience.

“They be idle, therefore they cry, saying, Let us go and sacrifice to
our God.” And still there are men who hold the same opinion, that time
spent in devotion is wasted, as regards the duties of real life. In
truth, religion means freshness, elasticity and hope: a man will be not
slothful in business, but fervent in spirit, if he serves the Lord. But
perhaps immortal hope, and the knowledge that there is One Who shall
break all prison bars and let the oppressed go free, are not the best
narcotics to drug down the soul of a man into the monotonous tameness of
a slave.

In the tenth verse we read that the Egyptian taskmasters and the
officers combined to urge the people to their aggravated labours. And by
the fourteenth verse we find that the latter officials were Hebrew
officers whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them.

So that we have here one of the surest and worst
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effects of
slavery—namely, the demoralisation of the oppressed, the readiness of
average men, who can obtain for themselves a little relief, to do so at
their brethren’s cost. These officials were scribes, “writers”: their
business was to register the amount of labour due, and actually
rendered. These were doubtless the more comfortable class, of whom we
read afterwards that they possessed property, for their cattle escaped
the murrain and their trees the hail. And they had the means of
acquiring quite sufficient skill to justify whatever is recorded of the
works done in the construction of the tabernacle. The time is long past
when scepticism found support for its incredulity in these details.

One advantage of the last sharp agony of persecution was that it finally
detached this official class from the Egyptian interest, and welded
Israel into a homogeneous people, with officers already provided. For,
when the supply of bricks came short, these officials were beaten, and,
as if no cause of the failure were palpable, they were asked, with a
malicious chuckle, “Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your task both
yesterday and to-day, as heretofore?” And when they explain to Pharaoh,
in words already expressive of their alienation, that the fault is with
“thine own people,” they are repulsed with insult, and made to feel
themselves in evil case. For indeed they needed to be chastised for
their forgetfulness of God. How soon would their hearts have turned
back, how much more bitter yet would have been their complaints in the
desert, if it were not for this last experience! But if judgment began
with them, what should presently be the fate of their oppressors?

Their broken spirit shows itself by murmuring, not
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against Pharaoh, but
against Moses and Aaron, who at least had striven to help them. Here, as
in the whole story, there is not a trace of either the lofty spirit
which could have evolved the Mosaic law, or the hero-worship of a later
age.

It is written that Moses, hearing their reproaches, “returned unto the
Lord,” although no visible shrine, no consecrated place of worship, can
be thought of.

What is involved is the consecration which the heart bestows upon any
place of privacy and prayer, where, in shutting out the world, the soul
is aware of the special nearness of its King. In one sense we never
leave Him, never return to Him. In another sense, by direct address of
the attention and the will, we enter into His presence; we find Him in
the midst of us, Who is everywhere. And all ceremonial consecrations do
their office by helping us to realise and act upon the presence of Him
in Whom, even when He is forgotten, we live and move and have our being.
Therefore in the deepest sense each man consecrates or desecrates for
himself his own place of prayer. There is a city where the Divine
presence saturates every consciousness with rapture. And the seer beheld
no temple therein, for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the
temple of it.

Startling to our notions of reverence are the words in which Moses
addresses God. “Lord, why hast Thou evil entreated this people? Why is
it that Thou hast sent me? for since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Thy
name, he hath evil entreated this people; neither hast Thou delivered
Thy people at all.” It is almost as if his faith had utterly given way,
like that of the Psalmist when he saw the wicked in great prosperity,
while waters of a full cup were
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wrung out by the people of God (Ps.
lxxiii. 3, 10). And there is always a dangerous moment when the first
glow of enthusiasm burns down, and we realise how long the process, how
bitter the disappointments, by which even a scanty measure of success
must be obtained. Yet God had expressly warned Moses that Pharaoh would
not release them until Egypt had been smitten with all His plagues. But
the warning passed unapprehended, as we let many a truth pass
intellectually accepted it is true, but only as a theorem, a vague and
abstract formula. As we know that we must die, that worldly pleasures
are brief and unreal, and that sin draws evil in its train, yet wonder
when these phrases become solid and practical in our experience, so, in
the first flush and wonder of the promised emancipation, Moses had
forgotten the predicted interval of trial.

His words would have been profane and irreverent indeed but for one
redeeming quality. They were addressed to God Himself. Whenever the
people murmured, Moses turned for help to Him Who reckons the most
unconventional and daring appeal to Him far better than the most
ceremonious phrases in which men cover their unbelief: “Lord, wherefore
hast Thou evil entreated this people?” is in reality a much more pious
utterance than “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.”
Wherefore Moses receives large encouragement, although no formal answer
is vouchsafed to his daring question.

Even so, in our dangers, our torturing illnesses, and many a crisis
which breaks through all the crust of forms and conventionalities, God
may perhaps recognise a true appeal to Him, in words which only
scandalise the orthodoxy of the formal and precise. In the bold
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rejoinder of the Syro-Phœnician woman He recognised great faith. His
disciples would simply have sent her away as clamorous.

Moses had again failed, even though Divinely commissioned, in the work
of emancipating Israel, and thereupon he had cried to the Lord Himself
to undertake the work. This abortive attempt, however, was far from
useless: it taught humility and patience to the leader, and it pressed
the nation together, as in a vice, by the weight of a common burden, now
become intolerable. At the same moment, the iniquity of the tyrant was
filled up.

But the Lord did not explain this, in answer to the remonstrance of
Moses. Many things happen, for which no distinct verbal explanation is
possible, many things of which the deep spiritual fitness cannot be
expressed in words. Experience is the true commentator upon Providence,
if only because the slow building of character is more to God than
either the hasting forward of deliverance or the clearing away of
intellectual mists. And it is only as we take His yoke upon us that we
truly learn of Him. Yet much is implied, if not spoken out, in the
words, “Now (because the time is ripe) shalt thou see what I will do to
Pharaoh (I, because others have failed); for by a strong hand shall he
let them go, and by a strong hand shall he drive them out of the land.”
It is under the weight of the “strong hand” of God Himself that the
tyrant must either bend or break.

Similar to this is the explanation of many delays in answering our
prayer, of the strange raising up of tyrants and demagogues, and of much
else that perplexes Christians in history and in their own experience.
These events develop human character,
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for good or evil. And they give
scope for the revealing of the fulness of the power which rescues. We
have no means of measuring the supernatural force which overcomes but by
the amount of the resistance offered. And if all good things came to us
easily and at once, we should not become aware of the horrible pit, our
rescue from which demands gratitude. The Israelites would not have sung
a hymn of such fervent gratitude when the sea was crossed, if they had
not known the weight of slavery and the anguish of suspense. And in
heaven the redeemed who have come out of great tribulation sing the song
of Moses and of the Lamb.

Fresh air, a balmy wind, a bright blue sky—which of us feels a thrill
of conscious exultation for these cheap delights? The released prisoner,
the restored invalid, feels it:

“The common earth, the air, the skies,

To him are opening paradise.”

Even so should Israel be taught to value deliverance. And now the
process could begin.